The lost art of many things
Last week, a fellow professor posted on Facebook about his students simply sending an email with no cover message and only an attachment. No address, no subject line, no explanation of what the document was for.
I commented in agreement and brought up our experiences in my department. We did get blank messages, but we also had students who put a single word (“bump”) to bring a message higher up in the inbox queue, in lieu of writing a follow-up message.
Some might bemoan this as the lost art of letter writing, but that assumes that all we want is a document for the sake of appearances, an abundance of prose to make us feel important, a salutation to help us preen our feathers. Letters are more than that.
I remembered this as I sat at the talk of Dr. Alejandro Barranquero, associate professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and a visiting faculty member.
He talked about the slow media movement. This came from the slow food movement of the 1980s, spearheaded by Italy as a response to growing consumerism and the proliferation of fast-food chains. The name is almost self-explanatory: patronize only food that has been cooked on the spot for you, sit down and savor it, engage with people as you eat.
Enjoy the slowness of the present instead of running from it–or instead of running, period.
The “slow” movement, according to Dr. Barranquero, is misleadingly linked nowadays to an outright fast from social media. True, social media boasts of rapidity: comments in real time, live events, and information on nearly everything in a single breath. Slow media, however, isn’t about avoiding or giving things up. It’s about being deliberate with one’s choices and discerning the amount of time and degree of urgency a task requires.
The slow food movement, therefore, means savoring food, because that is its purpose: to be appreciated for how it nourishes us, tasted in homage to the person who prepared it, remembered for what it symbolizes in our many cultures. Food doesn’t always have to be fast.
The slow media movement, then, means actively choosing which media to engage in, not on the basis of appearances or bombastic voices or partisan politics, but through weighing different opinions, searching for confirming information, and waiting until something is corroborated before sharing or commenting.
News doesn’t always have to be fast. Yes, news in a crisis should be fast, and our response to a crisis must be swift, because that’s how a crisis has to be resolved. Not everything, however, deserves to be treated as a crisis; not everything requires an urgent fix, a quick reply, a haphazard message in the interest of time.
That is what slow media is: knowing where to expend one’s energy and where to conserve it, knowing how to react and why, and acknowledging context. Again: deliberate, discerning.
I think this is what we miss from well-written letters. Letter writing used to be widely taught in schools, and it trained us in more than formatting and grammar. The letter isn’t just a decoration or a wrap over a more important document. Formal or informal, a letter is a way for the writer to say to the reader: I understand that you are busy, but I need your help. I will not let you sift through information to find out what I need. I acknowledge that you have your own concerns, schedules, and obligations.
Letter writing is about clarity and consideration. The lessons of high school, by that same token, were about the power of clear writing and of being considerate of someone else’s life.
This is something we miss whenever we get a blank letter with an attachment or a single word to push a letter to the top of one’s inbox. We feel as though we are mere graders and givers of feedback, mere cogs in a machine who are expected to be as fast as the rest of the world–not humans, not mentors, not guides.
Typers. Word-vomiters. Number-crunchers.
Missing here is the consideration—but more alarming is the discernment and deliberation we hope to see in our students before they click send, speak up, or do anything at all. It’s the same thing we miss in those who share fake news without first thinking through their actions, or those who pass judgment so quickly without first listening to someone’s story.
We miss that which is behind the stigmatized “slow”: a chance to breathe, deliberation on the possible outcomes of one’s decisions, shutting out the noise of the world in favor of thinking of someone else’s welfare, instead of focusing so hard on what we want to finish that we also forget to imagine.
Should we bring writing letters back? Cursive penmanship? To simply plug these into a curriculum would be useless without a much larger systemic and cultural change of prizing discernment over haste, putting value on thinking before doing, rewarding that which has been designed with deliberation rather than adopted because of attraction.
In a world where haste has led to violence and death, slowness is not a luxury–it might one day be survival.
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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu
